


Partners In...Other Things

by ageless_aislynn



Series: Partners In Crime [3]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M, Pregnancy Scares, Snowells, Unplanned Pregnancy, reversefrost
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-30
Updated: 2019-01-30
Packaged: 2019-10-17 13:56:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17561693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ageless_aislynn/pseuds/ageless_aislynn
Summary: Caitlin and Eobard tackle an unexpected situation.





	Partners In...Other Things

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally meant for the 2018 Snowells Week but it just didn't seem to fit, once all was said and done. I got most of it written at that time, though, and when I came across it again the other day, suddenly my muse wanted to finish it. *spreads hands* So, here we have it, lol! ;)
> 
> This also has a home at [Tumblr](http://ageless-aislynn.tumblr.com/post/182413323010/partners-inother-things-agelessaislynn-the). If you read, I hope you enjoy! ♥

Eobard leaned over the latest project on his lab table, hearing the click of Caitlin's heels long before she appeared. The sound was familiar and reassuring, which was more than a little disconcerting.

 _Now, very carefully, with the utmost precision..._ he thought, threading a hair-thin wire through a tiny ring.

"I think I'm pregnant," Caitlin announced from the doorway.

It was a credit to his extremely steady hands that the involuntary flinch in his shoulders didn't translate into a mile-wide smoking crater rippling through several multiverses with their charred corpses in the center.

"Maybe next time wait until I'm not _building a quantum bomb_ to tell me something like that," he said, sealing the device securely away before looking at her.

Her expression was a mix of annoyance and abject terror but, to her credit, she was holding back the cold. Even the roots of her hair remained brown, without even a flicker of icy white.

"Now," he said, "let's try that again. Why do you think you're pregnant?"

"I missed my period and we have a lot of sex that we're not always careful about."

He arched an eyebrow. "Well, that could do it, true. But you've had irregular periods before."

She gave him a sharp look.

"What?" he said, spreading his hands. "I'm observant, I notice these sorts of things. So is there something more than that? Have you taken a pregnancy test?"

"Not yet."

Her hair was still blowing when he blurred back into the room, a small box in hand.

"Here you go," he said graciously, offering it to her.

"Do you just keep these laying around?" she scoffed.

"I hadn't shoplifted anything in three days. I was beginning to lose my supervillain street cred," he said in a similar tone, shaking the box gently at her.

"You probably left money on the counter," she retorted sullenly but snatched the box from him and marched away.

He followed, neither confirming nor denying, but inwardly he wondered if his supervillain street cred was irrevocably damaged in the public's eyes or just in hers.

"I don't need help with this," she said, shutting the bathroom door in his face.

"Never meant to suggest you did," he murmured and retreated to the kitchen to make coffee. _When in doubt, placate Killer Frost with coffee_ , he thought then his hand paused in mid-air. _Wait, if she really is pregnant, she shouldn't have caffeine_.

In the end, he went with decaf just to be safe.

She was gone for so long, he thought she was waiting out the results without him but eventually she strode through the doorway and mutely sat at the table. He put her coffee in front of her and she took a sip, then grimaced and shot him one of her patented icy expressions.

A kitchen drone approached with a speculative _whir?_ , expecting her to make her opinion on decaf known with a toss of the mug against the wall. Instead, she continued to drink, one hand reaching down to idly pet the top of the drone's domed head. The _whir_ became a _purr_ that he had never programmed in.

He joined her at the table and, as he set his own mug down, she snatched it up and took a drink from it, then arched a brow at him.

"Just easier to make them the same," he said with a shrug. "But now you've got lipstick on my second favorite mug."

The white mug had a black checkered flag logo that read "Now Entering The Speed Zone." _Zone_ had been crossed out in red and _Force_ was written off to the side. A pale coral stain was barely visible on the rim.

"It's your color," she said and hid the ghost of a smile behind her own pale blue mug as she drank.

They sat there silently until a timer chimed from the distance. Caitlin's mug clattered loudly against the table top.

Eobard resisted the urge to superspeed into the bathroom. "Shall we?" he said very politely and let her go ahead of him. She slowed the closer they got to the bathroom doorway until he thought he was going to have to push her the rest of the way in.

"Okay," she said with a heavy explosion of breath, picking up the stick from the sink. "It says... Um, what does that say?"

He squinted over her shoulder. "I believe the official term is 'a little bit pregnant,' isn't it?"

"It's inconclusive?" she said, flinging the test away, her tone growing shriller. "Inconclusive? I--"

White appeared at the roots of her hair and the ambient temperature of the room dropped. 

"Cait," he warned.

"You've got something to stop me," she said, grabbing his arm. "You've got to have made _some_ sort of weapon to stop me from icing out."

"Caitlin," he said and it was a different warning in his voice.

"I know you, Eobard. I'm too dangerous for you not to have made something to stop me!"

Her fingers bit into his arm, cold but not yet enough to do damage either to himself or to her _maybe, maybe not_ unborn.

"You can stop yourself," he said firmly.

"Eobard!"

He leaned down into her face and said in a tone every bit as cold as hers, "And if I _had_ a weapon, what do you think it would do to a baby?"

 _That_ made her panic slam to a stop. The cold receded from her hands and the roots of her hair returned to their usual brown.

"Now," he said, lightening his tone. "Let's settle this in the lab. You can certainly run a simple pregnancy test yourself, can't you?"

She nodded but, once she was standing there with the syringe in her hand, she balked. "You know, this is probably just a false alarm. Like you said, I've been irregular before. If I just give it a few more days..."

He gave her a look.

"All right," she muttered.

"All right," he echoed calmly. 

***

"Take me for a run," Caitlin said as she completed the test and disposed of the syringe.

Eobard looked back and forth from her to the machine whirling away behind her.

"The results won't take long--" he started to say but then saw the gleam of silver in her eyes and changed tactics. "Where do you want to go?"

"Anywhere not here. Away. I don't care. Just run."

He picked her up, cradling her to his chest, and sped off. He kept far below his limit, again not certain of what the effect of high speed could be if she was pregnant, and made an educated guess as to what location might suit her current need.

So they ended up three states over and on the top of a high-rise owned by one of his many shell companies. He'd picked this one because it had a particularly nice view of the sunset over the cityscape.

When he put her down, she staggered away a few steps, gulping breath like she'd been underwater too long.

"I can't do this," she said, holding up a hand as if to either ward him off or to lean against his chest and she hadn't yet decided which. "I can't, I _won't_ make my child feel like my mother made me feel. And I don't want them to grow up without a dad like I did."

That stung unexpectedly, as if she'd hurled an icicle deep into his chest. "Whatever you might think of my parenting skills," he said tightly, "I don't have any doubt in yours. I think you'll be a great mom."

She was so in her own head at the moment, she didn't even register the insult she'd delivered.

"I don't have control," she said, staring blindly into the sunset. Long streaks of color smeared the sky, purple and pink and yellow and blue, but she didn't even see her favorite time of day unfolding in front of her. "You've helped me more than I ever thought you could but... Can I go nine months and not turn even once? What happens later? I'm frazzled from being up several nights in a row and the baby's crying and I go to pick her up and I lose control for _one second_ and..."

The word trailed off with a shuddery breath.

"That's not going to happen," he said.

"You can't be sure about that," she said angrily, scrubbing at her face with the heel of her hand, trying to hold back tears. Despite her best effort, ice glittered on her cheeks. "Being a single mom is hard enough without having to be terrified you're going to kill your child with a careless touch!"

This time, he wasn't letting that go unchallenged. "What a shame that your child doesn't have a father _who's standing right here_ to help you, isn't it? Are you planning on moving out immediately or do I at least get to spend a few hours with the baby? Do I get visitations or am I not even good enough for that much?"

She looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. "What? No, I didn't mean it like that. I meant... Look, I know your endgame has always been to get back to your own time. This thing with us... It's always been temporary."

His mouth opened then snapped shut. How could she know him so well in some ways and not know him at all? Before he could decide how to respond to that -- break the illusion and tell her the truth or let her keep on thinking what she obviously did -- she'd gone on. 

"Whether it's now or years from now, you're going to find a way to go back. What's going to happen then? Are you going to just look us up to see how things turned out for us? Or will you find a way to pull this child from their timeline, take them back with you to yours?" Her bottom lip quivered but she determinedly narrowed her eyes. "Because if you're planning on taking my daughter or son away from me, I promise you, you _will_ have the fight of your life on your hands."

He pursed his lips, exhaling noisily as he struggled to let go of the anger of his pricked ego in the face of her barely concealed fear. "Caitlin," he said flatly and let his tone convey the entire argument.

Emotions washed over her face and, for a moment, she looked more like her previous self than she had in a long while. "I'm sorry," she said softly. "You didn't deserve that."

She rubbed her face again. "It's just I know how much you love your home."

"Maybe I've come to love... a new home," he murmured, his words skidding out at the last possible moment. _Cowardice is a bad look on you, Eobard,_ he silently chastised himself.

She studied him for a long while as an entirely different set of emotions chased themselves across her face. In the end, she merely nodded and walked back to him. "Let's go get the results."

***

"Negative for human chorionic gonadotropin," Caitlin read aloud. "I'm not pregnant."

"Are you okay?" Eobard asked as he scanned the results once more.

"Yeah," she said, screwing her mouth about speculatively. "I'm relieved and a little sad, I guess. Is that weird?"

"Completely normal, I think," he assured her.

She chuckled dryly. "It's been a while since anybody's called me _that_. What about you?"

"Oh," he said airily, "I get called normal all the time whenever I'm enacting a nefarious plan while wearing my evil, yellow super-suit with my eyes glowing red."

She scoffed noisily but her tone was gentle. "How are you feeling about this whole near-miss? Do you... want kids?"

"Sure," he said and his easy answer startled a surprised noise out of her. "Not what you were expecting?"

"Our lifestyle isn't exactly family-friendly," she pointed out. "So, no."

"Hey, if we want to have a family, we can go straight--" as she arched a brow at him, he amended on the fly "--er. We can go _straighter_. Dial back the chance that some arch nemesis might think it's a good idea to target our kids. We can take 'mischief vacations' whenever we want to pull a job, then the rest of the time be a fun, happening PTA family unit who will launch anybody who threatens us into the nearest sun. We can have whatever life we want to have, Cait. We're not just partners in crime, you know? Nobody limits us but us."

That was as perilously close to a declaration of his true feelings as he'd ever dared. He fought to keep his breathing from growing increasingly more shallow as he waited for her response.

She took that all in for a bit, then shook herself slightly, silver appearing in her eyes. "I'm going to go ice out, blow off some steam."

He nodded slightly, exhaling in a controlled breath and desperately clinging to his patented nonchalant mien. "Have fun," he said with a _be my guest_ roll of one hand. "I've got a quantum bomb to finish."

He started past her in the direction of his lab, but she paused him with a touch to his arm. Her gaze locked onto the emblem on his chest and, with the tip of a finger, she circled it as if it were new to her. For a moment, it seemed like she had so many things she wanted to say that the enormity of it all overwhelmed her into silence.

But then she simplified it. "I love you, too," she said quietly, glancing up at him through her lashes.

"Of course you do. I'm very lovable," he said but his flippant tone wasn't quite up to its usual standards and he'd paused a second too long, a lifetime in speedster terms. 

The start of a wry, knowing smile tugged at her mouth and he quickly pulled her into an embrace, burying his face in her hair so she couldn't see his face. He'd already given away enough today, thank you very much. Had to save a few things to surprise her with in the future, after all.


End file.
